Ouroboros
A serpent curled into a circle with its tail in its mouth. The oldest known example is on a gilded shrine of Tutankhamun; Greek alchemists in Egypt later drew it around the words “the all is one”, and since the Renaissance it has usually been read as eternity.
Meaning
The name is Greek: Dictionary.com derives ouroboros from ourobóros drákōn, “tail-devouring (snake)”, and gives it as oor-uh-BUR-uhs. The image is older than the name. In Egypt, the Egyptologist Dana Reemes argues, it was never a symbol with a fixed meaning of its own, only one variant among related images, and what it mostly stood for was protective enclosure. Later cultures each gave it a reading: the cosmos for Greek writers, the year returning on itself for Latin ones, time and eternity for the scholars and emblem books of the Renaissance.
Origin and history
The oldest known ouroboros is on the second gilded shrine of Tutankhamun, from the New Kingdom, in a funerary composition Egyptologists call the Enigmatic Underworld Book. Two serpents, each with its tail in its mouth, circle the head and the feet of a huge mummiform figure whose middle holds the sun disc. Reemes, following the Egyptologist John Darnell, reads the figure as most likely the united Re-Osiris, the gods Re and Osiris at the moment they combine, and Darnell reads the upper serpent as enclosing the heavens and the lower one the underworld. Reemes adds that the tail-biting serpent is never a sign in Egyptian writing: it appears in pictures, not in hieroglyphic texts.
Is the ouroboros Egyptian or Greek?
The picture is Egyptian and the word is Greek. Reemes finds no Egyptian word behind it: the Egyptian phrases proposed as its source are last recorded three or four centuries before the Greek term first appears, and he treats ouroboros as a descriptive word coined by Greek speakers for a serpent they first met in Egyptian art. Horapollo, whose Hieroglyphica explains Egyptian signs in Greek, wrote that when the Egyptians wanted to express the cosmos, they drew a snake devouring its own tail.
“The all is one” in Greek alchemy
The Chrysopoeia, or “gold-making”, of the alchemist Cleopatra is a single page of drawings and captions in a manuscript of the Greek alchemical writings in Venice, Marcianus 299, a tenth- or eleventh-century Byzantine copy of what Reemes calls a presumed Alexandrian original. Near the bottom left an ouroboros encloses the axiom hen to pan, which Marcellin Berthelot, who published the page in 1887, translated as “the all is one”. At the top, three rings surround the signs for gold, silver and mercury. The outer ring runs out into a tail, which Berthelot took to mean that it too is the serpent, and its words, in his French rendering, say “One is the all, and through it the all, and towards it the all; and if the all does not contain the all, the all is nothing.”
The Gnostic dragon
Gnostic writers used the serpent for the edge of the world. In the Pistis Sophia, in G. R. S. Mead's translation, Jesus tells Mary that “the outer darkness is a great dragon, whose tail is in his mouth, outside the whole world and surrounding the whole world.” Berthelot found the same serpent in older magic: the Leiden papyrus, a book of spells, describes a magic ring whose stone bears a serpent biting its tail, and engraved gems in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris show the ouroboros with the seven vowels. He took both for signs of Gnostic influence.
How it came to mean eternity
Eternity is the youngest of its meanings. Reemes traces the link with time to Latin writers, beginning with Servius, whose fourth-century commentary on Virgil says the Egyptians marked the year with a serpent biting its tail “because it (i.e., the year) returns upon itself.” In his 1492 edition of Plotinus, Marsilio Ficino, citing Horapollo, gave the serpent the meaning “time” (Horapollo had said the cosmos) and added wings to it. The Renaissance emblem books stretched time to immortality and the eternal, and Reemes argues that this Renaissance ouroboros led nineteenth-century Egyptologists to call the Egyptian image the “serpent of eternity”, a reading he finds no support for in Egyptian sources.
Kekulé’s dream of the snake
The best-known modern ouroboros belongs to chemistry. In 1890, at a celebration of the 25th anniversary of his benzene paper of 1865, August Kekulé said that, dozing by the fire, he had watched chains of atoms “all twining and twisting in snakelike motion” until “one of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail”; that, as he told it, was where the idea of the benzene ring came from. Mike Sutton, in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Chemistry World, places the dream in Kekulé’s lodgings in Ghent in the winter of 1861–2. William Ashworth of the Linda Hall Library writes that most historians see no reason to doubt an account Kekulé gave in person to his peers, while others suspect he told it to shore up his claim to priority; Sutton notes that the Viennese schoolteacher Josef Loschmidt had printed a ring among his possible structures for benzene in 1861. Kekulé ended the speech with a warning of his own: “Let us learn to dream … but let us beware of publishing our dreams before they have been put to the proof by the waking understanding.”
See also
Sources
- The Egyptian Ouroboros: An Iconological and Theological Study, Dana Michael Reemes; PhD dissertation, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015 (eScholarship), Abstract; ch. 1–3; figure 34; ch. 6 (Greek and Latin reception)
- Collection des anciens alchimistes grecs, vol. 1, by Marcellin Berthelot, with Ch.-Em. Ruelle, Georges Steinheil, Paris, 1887 (scan on the Internet Archive), Introduction: Papyrus de Leide; Figures d’appareils, figure 11 (pp. 132–134)
- Pistis Sophia, A Fourth Book, Chapter 126, translated by G. R. S. Mead (1921), The Gnostic Society Library (gnosis.org), Chapter 126, “Of the dragon of the outer darkness”
- Snakes, sausages and structural formulae, Mike Sutton, Chemistry World (Royal Society of Chemistry)
- August Kekulé (Scientist of the Day), William B. Ashworth, Jr., Linda Hall Library
- Ouroboros (Dictionary.com), Dictionary.com, Pronunciation; etymology
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research